What do businesses want from Cloud Computing? It's clear they find its promised benefits of agility, flexibility and elastic scalability highly attractive – but as adoption grows, an increasing number of organisations will demand more.
Organisations will want choice with the ability to mix and match cloud services; and to move data and applications between different Cloud platforms with drag-and-drop ease. Above all, they will want to avoid the problem of vendor lock-in. If they find a Cloud provider they like better than the one they're currently using, the freedom to shift entire workloads to the new provider's platform will be a key differentiator.
Right now, choice and freedom are problematic issues for would-be cloud adopters. All cloud platforms - both public and private - rely on virtualisation technology that enables a single server to run multiple virtual machines (VMs). But the hypervisors that allocate a host machine's resources to an individual VM remain resolutely proprietary from vendor to vendor, storing and configuring operating systems and applications in different ways.
Change on the horizon
At Atos Origin, we believe that the situation is set to change. As Cloud Computing matures, the IT industry has quickly come to realise that the problem of cloud interoperability is, for many organisations, a stumbling block that holds them back from more ambitious deployments of the technology. As a result, industry leaders are working to address it. Standards are beginning to emerge that are making more mature cloud applications - email systems, for example - eminently more portable.
Over time, this trend will spread to a wider range of applications. To date, numerous proprietary and open application programming interfaces (APIs) have been proposed to provide better management, security and interoperability between infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. These include the Elastic Compute Cloud API from Amazon, the vCloud API from VMware and the Open Cloud API from Sun Microsystems.
When it comes to workload migration, a key initiative is the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) devised by industry body, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The OVF standard enables an organisation to create a VM instance on top of one hypervisor and then export it so that it can be run by another hypervisor. It is supported by most of the open cloud APIs that exist today and by a wide range of vendors, including Citrix Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware (but notably not by Amazon).
The development of standards is great news for customers. As the industry has proved many times in the past, choice fuels competition and competition fuels innovation. Over time, we believe that customer demand will see these standards whittled down to just a handful of options. At the same time, a new class of cloud service brokers is emerging, offering to abstract incompatible APIs on behalf of clients, through a Cloud orchestration layer.
Cloud interoperability – getting it right
But while such developments have exciting implications, businesses still need to make careful decisions about how they forge a path to the Cloud. It's not just a question of picking the right provider for now, but of crafting a strategy that will enable seamless Cloud-hopping in the future.
At Atos Origin, we're finding that customers currently have two key questions about Cloud interoperability. First, they want to know how they can enable cloud-based applications to share data. Second, they're asking how they can move whole payloads from one cloud environment to another.
For us, it's about enabling them to identify smart ways to 'layer' applications onto the Cloud. With many of the third-party enterprise applications they currently use, that's a problem because the vendors did not develop these applications with the cloud in mind.
As a result, companies we work with are considering replacing core enterprise applications with software-as-a-service (SaaS) options from vendors such as Salesforce and Netsuite - software that was 'born in the Cloud'.
Or, they're writing their own Cloud apps. If development teams are writing a new Microsoft .Net application in Visual Studio, for example, there is now a plug-in available that will enable them to either deploy that app in a Microsoft Azure environment or to a private cloud platform. In the same way, Eclipse plug-ins are emerging for Java applications developed using J2EE.
At the same time, IT teams need to consider how they will move workloads between clouds without user downtime. This is a critical issue with many core enterprise applications, where availability issues can seriously impact company productivity and profitability. Here, too, we're seeing a range of solutions emerge, as systems management companies scramble to provide the 'glue' that will enable this kind of transition to become downtime-free.
Future considerations
Over time, we believe that organisations will need to consider other aspects of Cloud interoperability, too. They'll want to provide users who access multiple Cloud services with single sign-on capabilities, for example. They may wish to enable a single application to span multiple Cloud services, using storage on demand from one provider and transaction processing from another. And for many, it will be extremely useful - and cost effective - to allow applications that reside in their own private cloud infrastructure to tap into resources from a public Cloud environment when excess capacity is needed.
If organisations are to exploit Cloud Computing effectively, IT teams will need to reorganise. They'll need to adopt a whole new service management and business operational model in order to achieve the visibility and management required to orchestrate a distributed service environment. So Cloud governance looks set to be a key priority for many, because today's best practices in IT management will no longer apply to the new model.
Despite the challenges, however, we believe that greater Cloud interoperability looks set to put businesses firmly in the driving seat, giving them the freedom and choice to shape the Cloud in a way that suits them best. In the Cloud Computing age, no Cloud provider can afford to adopt a protectionist position. But equally, no Cloud customer can afford not to address the thorny issue of how best to exploit the wide range of sophisticated services that is evolving and how best to control the introduction of service innovation.
Stephen Holmes, Director Cloud Strategy & Offerings at Atos Origin
